What Lies Beneath (2001, DVD)

Just when I think Harrison Ford has moved on from his long stint at mediocrity and established some credibility with a few decent performances I come across something like this turkey. I refer to What Lies Beneath - a tepid, boring, predictable, slow-moving accumulation of Alfred Hitchcock-influenced dreck punctuated by a host of horror/suspense clich s for good measure.

I enjoyed Harrison Ford in K19: The Widowmaker and Hollywood Homicide after seeing how far he had slipped in the intervening years since Indiana Jones so I was prepared to be pleasantly surprised by some of his later works. You can imagine how disappointed I am that he once again phoned in a performance in this overdone, poorly paced potboiler. I feel betrayed. Never again!

The film has a screenplay that I hope was written by a chimpanzee or at least under an assumed name. I sure wouldn t want it on my r sum . Anyway, an attractive couple, played by Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford inhabit a picturesque old house in Vermont. The house is old and H-U-G-E. It s so huge; the bathroom is bigger than my master bedroom. Not only that, the bathtub is smack-dab in the middle. At least eight feet from any wall.

To start the festivities off Michelle decides to play let s spy on the neighbors in the vein of - you guessed it, Hitchcock. The director spends lots of time on binocular shots and eavesdropping and Harrison and Michelle even open all the windows and compete with them for who can **** the loudest. This half-hour sequence was the best part of the movie. Once you are pretty sure there has been some foul play, then this thread is abandoned and we move into the REAL story so we think.

Michelle starts seeing and hearing things. There is a ghost, or maybe she is going cuckoo. Anyway, this provides a good hour or so of back and forth is she or isn t she until it too gets abandoned and then we move into the REAL story. (Can you sense I am not totally thrilled by this screenplay)?

By the time the film gets to the chase I had abandoned caring whatever else happened for the last half hour. By the way, there is a false climax and that is where director Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump) should have left off rather than going to the BIG HOLLYWOOD ENDING!

In all fairness, I did enjoy Michelle Pfeiffer s performance, which although confined to the boringly s-l-o-w pace mandated by Zemeckis , nonetheless painted a distinctive portrait of an edgy, yet fairly boring character. She has one interesting scene where she takes on the personality of someone else, which is well done and interesting. It lasts, oh, a minute, with the best five seconds being her sitting with legs splayed apart. After that, back to the boredom.

Photography by Don Burgess made use of a lot of angles, handheld, and reflections in mirrors, however the editing should have left at least half of this footage on the cutting room floor. There is very little storytelling in this film for all its 127 minute running time. The composer Alan Sylvestri, who should know better being that he composed the excellent Young Guns 2, even cribbed bits of Bernard Herrmann's old work for the score.

The 20th Century Fox DVD is presented in 2.35: 1 theatrical format and contains a director s commentary, documentary, and subtitles as extras. For someone who had never seen a horror/suspense movie before What Lies Beneath might be a film to see but everybody else is going to spot the clich s and guess the surprises a mile away.

Miss this turkey!